Decolonization : Indigeneity, Education & Society invites submissions from scholars, artists, and activists for a new special issue of the journal exploring gender, sexuality and decolonization, guest edited by Karyn Recollet (University of Toronto), in conjunction with Eric Ritskes, Editor of Decolonization.

This issue invites us to consider both the centrality of gender and sexual violence to colonization, but also, relatedly, the centrality of gender and sexual justice to decolonization. Too often these issues have been seen as peripheral to the larger struggles against colonialism, too often cis-heteropatriarchal normativity has been justified in the name of decolonization. This has to stop.

To us, it seems impossible to discuss Indigenous sovereignty without a discussion of body sovereignty. It seems impossible to discuss environmental justice without connecting the violence against the earth to the violences against our bodies, particularly the bodies of women, Two Spirit, queer, transgender and others who fall beyond and in resistance to the male cis-heteropatriarchal norms of colonial society. Not only do these bodies bear the brunt of colonial violence, they also embody, create and sustain the theories, movements, and creative actions that resist it. Decolonization is impossible without gender and sexual justice as articulated by women, Two Spirit, queer, transgender and others who fall beyond and in resistance to male cis-heteropatriarchal norms. These are the experiences and voices that this issue seeks to center and honor in seeking ways forward for decolonization.

As always, we are interested in papers that connect theoretical discussions with active decolonization work by engaging the intersections of theory and practice.

This issue invites contributors to consider the following questions and themes that, while far from exhaustive, are at the forefront of our thinking for this issue :

 How is colonial violence predicated on and enacted through cis-heteropatriarchal gender norms and understandings of sexuality ? How are these forms of violence complicated by race, age, location, and space ? As colonial violence is enacted on bodies, how is resistance and decolonization also embodied ?
 What does decolonial love look like ? What is the role of decolonial love in resistance and resurgence ? What is the role of hope, of envisioning future modes of relationship that both transcend and reconstruct the present ? Relatedly, thinking of Audre Lorde’s uses of the erotic, and the Native Youth Sexual Health Network’s (NYSHN) use of the term “Resistance is Sexy”, what role does the erotic have in resistance ? How are decolonial understandings of what is sexy or erotic reconstituted through resistance and struggle ?
 How are the experiences of Two Spirit, transgender, queer and others who fall beyond and in resistance to the male cis-heteropatriarchal norms of colonial society central in engaging and generating a politics of refusal, particularly refusal of the settler colonial state and its definitional power ? How, through this refusal, are we generating spatial (de/re)orientations of decolonial love, reconstructing and remapping the spaces where gender and sexual justice might happen outside and at the margins of the state, as part of a trajectory against and beyond the state ?
 How do we pull back or unlayer the colonial violences that hyper- or de-sexualize Indigenous, Black and peoples of color, by renaming where we find beauty in our communities and our selves on our own terms ?
 What are the creative practices in which Indigenous, Black and other non-White feminisms intervene into cis-heteropatriarchy, coloniality, and other related systems of oppression ? What vocabularies of feminism are being (re)imagined and (re)generated, what practices being created, in these communities to combat colonialism and create solidarity against colonial patriarchy and white supremacy along the lines of gender and sexuality ?
 What are Indigenous and other traditions of gender and sexual justice ? How has the ‘traditional’ been mobilized in ways that further, and are complicit in, colonial cis-heteropatriarchal violences ? How might tradition and traditional practices be re-conceptualized, re-generated, or re-understood through gender and sexual justice paradigms ?
 How are youth, as well as other gender and sexual justice advocates, mobilizing in new ways, utilizing new tools, and establishing new forums for decolonizing practices ? What generative critiques are being encoded into and through these new tools ; for example, in and through digital territories ? How might intergenerational dialogues be created to further the decolonization of gender and sexual justice ?
 Often anticolonial violence has been theorized and enacted within cis-heteropatriarchal norms, enacting problematic tropes of the soldier, the warrior, or the revolutionary that are rooted in gender violences. How have women, Two Spirit, transgender, queer and others who fall beyond and in resistance to cis-heteropatriarchal norms been silenced and marginalized in anticolonial and decolonization movements through these tropes ? How might decolonization (and conceptions of anticolonial violence) be reconceptualized or reimagined within feminist, queer, transgender, Two Spirit, or other paradigms ?

Contributions are to be submitted at www.decolonization.org no later than March 16, 2015. This issue is scheduled for release in Fall 2015.

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